Time Capsule Draft: “Speculating About Xbox Next”

I was digging through my Ventspace post drafts, and I found this writeup that I apparently decided not to post. It was written in March of 2012, a full year and a half before the Xbox One arrived in the market. In retrospect, I’m apparently awesome. On the one hand, I wish I’d posted this up at the time, because it’s eerily accurate. On the other hand, the guesses are actually accurate enough that this might have looked to Microsoft like a leak, rather than speculation. Oh well. Here it is for your amusement. I haven’t touched a thing about it.

I’ve been hearing a lot of rumors, though the credibility of any given information is always suspect. I have some supposed info about the specs on the next Xbox, but I’m not drawing on any of that info here. I’m dubious about at least some of the things I heard, and it’s not good to spill that kind of info if you’re trying to maintain a vaguely positive relationship with a company anyway. So what I’m presenting here is strictly speculation based on extrapolation of what we’ve seen in the past and overall industry and Microsoft trends. I’m also assuming that MS is fairly easy to read and that they’re unlikely to come out of left field here.

8 GB shared memory. The original Xbox had 64 MB of shared memory. The Xbox 360 has 512, a jump of 8x. This generation is dragging along a little longer, and memory prices have dropped violently in the last year or so. I would like to see 16 GB actually, but the consoles always screw us on memory and I just don’t think we’ll be that lucky. 4 GB is clearly too low, they’d be insane to ship a console with that now. As for the memory type, we’re probably talking simple (G)DDR3 shared modules. The Xboxes have always been shared memory and there’s no reason for them to change that now. Expect some weird addressing limitations on the GPU side.

Windows 8 kernel. All indications are that the WinCE embedded kernel is being retired over the next two years (at least for internal use). There’s a substantial tech investment in Windows 8, and I think we’re going to see the desktop kernel roll out across all three screens. (HINT HINT.) iOS and Android are both running stripped desktop kernels, and the resources in current mobile platforms make WinXP’s minimum hardware requirements look comically low. There is no reason to carry the embedded kernel along any longer. I wouldn’t want to be a CE licensee right now.

x86-64, 8×2 threads, out of order CPU. There are three plausible CPU architectures to choose from: x86, ARM, and PowerPC. Remember what I said about the Windows 8 kernel? There’s no Windows 8 PPC build, and we’re not going to see PowerPC again here. ARM is of course a big focus right now, but the design parameters of the current chips simply won’t accommodate a console. They’re not fast enough and that can’t be easily revised. That pretty much leaves us with x86. The only extant in-order x86 architecture is Intel Atom, which sucks. I think they’ll get out of order for free from the existing architectures. As far as the CPU, 8 core is essentially the top of the market right now, and I’m assuming they’ll hyperthread it. They’ll probably steal a core away from the OS, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they disable another core for yield purposes. That means six HT cores, which is a simple doubling of the current Xbox. I have a rumored clock-speed, but have decided not to share. Think lower rather than higher.

DirectX 11 GPU — AMD? DX11 class should be blatantly obvious. I have reason to believe that AMD is the supplier, and I did hear a specific arch but I don’t believe it. There’s no word in NVIDIA land about a potential contract, either. No idea if they’re giving the design ownership to MS again or anything like that, all I know is the arrows are all pointed the same way. There are some implications for the CPU here.

Optical drive? — I don’t think they want to have one. I do think they have to have one, though you can definitely expect a stronger push towards digital distribution than ever. There’s no choice but to support Blu-ray at this point. Top tier games simply need the space. I suspect that we’ll see a very large (laptop grade) hard drive included in at least some models. Half terabyte large, with larger sizes later in the lifecycle. That is purely a guess, though.

AMD Fusion APU? — I’m going to outlandishly suggest that a Fusion APU could be the heart of this console. With an x86 CPU and a mainstream Radeon core in about the right generation, the existing Fusion product could be retooled for use in a console. Why not? It already has the basic properties you want in a console chip. The big sticking points are performance and heat. It’s easy to solve either one but not both at once, and we all know what happened last time Microsoft pushed the heat envelope too far. If it is Fusion architecture, I would be shocked if they were to actually integrate the CPU and GPU dies.

Kinect. — Here’s another outlandish one: Every Xbox Next will include a Kinect (2?), in the box. Kinect has been an enormous winner for Microsoft so far on every single front, and this is where they’re going to draw the battle lines against Nintendo and Sony. Nintendo’s control scheme is now boring to the general public, with the Wii U being introduced to a resounding “meh”. PS Move faded into irrelevance the day it was launched. For the first time in many years, the Xbox is becoming the casual gamers’ console and they’re going to hammer that advantage relentlessly. Microsoft is also pushing use of secondary features (eg microphone) for hardcore games — see Mass Effect 3.

$500. Yes, it’s high, although not very high once you adjust for inflation. The Xbox 360 is an extremely capable device, especially for the no-so-serious crowd. It’s also pure profit for Microsoft, and really hitting its stride now as the general public’s long tail console. There’s no need to price its successor aggressively, and the stuff I just described is rather expensive besides. A $600 package option at launch would not be surprising.

November 2013. As with the last two Xboxes, it will be launched for the holiday season. Some people were saying it would be announced this year but the more I think about it, the less it makes sense to do so. There’s no way it’s launching this year, and they’re not going to announce it a year and some ahead of time. E3 2013 will probably be the real fun.

There are some problems with the specs I’ve listed so far. AMD doesn’t produce the CPU I described. Not that the rumors match any other known CPU, but Intel is closer. I don’t think one of the Phenom X6 designs is a credible choice. The Xbox 360 CPU didn’t match any existing chips either, so this may not really be a problem. The total package price would have to be quite high with a Kinect 2 included. The Xbox 360 may function as a useful buffer against being priced out of the market.